The present invention relates in general to a container apparatus and in particular to a sealable square bottom container bag for enclosing articles therewithin.
While many different containers have been used to enclose and carry items of various sizes, there have been difficulties in developing appropriate containers to carry various articles that are particularly small or liquid, such as oils, steam, or fine powdered materials. The concern with containing such articles has also become relevant in the food industry, with greater use of microwave ovens.
A common type of container used in a microwave oven is a bag. In order for a bag to be able to contain certain items for cooking in a microwave oven as well as for other non-microwave applications, items such as oils, fluids and fine powders, the bag must by "sift-proof", in other words there must exist a positively sealed secure periphery at all corners and edges of the bag bottom.
A common prior art bag, known in the industry as a full diamond fold bag does not meet the requirements of being sift-proof. There exists an area of space in the bottom panel of the bag which could lead to inadvertent seepage or spillage of the contents of the bag to the outside environment. In order to completely seal the bottom panel of a full diamond fold bag, a separate patch must often be adhered to the bottom of the bag to ensure that all folds and edges along the bottom of the bag are sift-proof. While providing an effective place to position advertisements or other information, this patch requires not only extra material to make, but extra adhesive to attach the patch to the bottom of the bag, as well as an extra printing operation.
It is possible to create a sift-proof bag as known in the prior art, however, in order to do this, the bag must often be constructed of multiple plies or layers of material. Essentially, what occurs with such a multi-ply bag is that the plies are staggered and overlap each other at potential sift areas. Adhesion through staggering or overlapping creates the sift-proof effect. While this method does have the advantage of allowing a bag to be formed from more than one material, for instance, the inner ply can be made from a grease-proof or wax-like material and the outer ply be made of a paper material; the extra ply, material and costs required to form such a bag may not always be desired. Furthermore, these bags often use pastes instead of printed, pre-cured, sealable adhesives to secure the various panels. This may lead to sloppy application and "squeeze out" of excess uncured adhesive from beneath the various panels and edges as well as lead to manufacturing speed and spill problems with the bag forming equipment. Prior art bags have additionally used more costly preliminary linear welds along the entire bag bottom, to ensure a sift-proof construction, prior to the further steps of folding, articulation and additional sealing of the flaps created by the preliminary welds.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a container apparatus which may be formed from a single or multiple plies of bag material, which requires neither an additional patch to be placed on the bottom of the container, nor a preliminary horizontal or vertical bag weld along the bottom, in order to provide a sift-proof container.
It is further an object of the present invention to minimize the amount of resources, namely adhesives and container material, required to form and articulate the container apparatus; and to eliminate adhesive spillage during "squeeze out" of such adhesive.
An additional object of this invention is to provide an S.O.S. (self-opening sack) product that is not only sift-proof but is capable of being formed economically and at a high rate of speed from a single ply of bag material--through formation and sealing on conventional bag-bottomer equipment in a substantially flat, high speed configuration; without such preliminary welding, in a third dimension, along the bottom edges of the bag. It is accordingly an objective of the invention to provide a container apparatus which requires minimal machine time, effort and materials to form such an apparatus, through application of an adhesive pattern that positively seals the bottom in a flat configuration, without inadvertently adhering a portion of the bottom to the interior of a front, back or side panel.
These and other objects of the invention will become apparent in light of the present specification and drawings.